In U.S. Pat. No. 5,159,900, one of the inventors herein disclose a rapid oxidation process to produce a gas for use as a fuel from water and carbon. This gas product is created by the decomposition of water through oxidation. Hydrogen is displaced when a substance is oxidized in water. Rapid oxidation can be forced by using an electrical arc to burn a substance within a biomass feedstock solution, thereby oxidizing the substance by an electro-thermochemical reaction. The result is the rapid formation of a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas (COH.sub.2).
The COH.sub.2 mixture is a gas which will burn very clean in oxygen or air, and therefore is desirable for use as a fuel in an internal combustion engine. When burned, COH.sub.2 produces carbon dioxide and water vapor, thereby adding very little, if any, pollution to the environment.
As discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,159,900, a problem arises in the storage of COH.sub.2 gas, and therefore it is desirable to produce COH.sub.2 gas on an on-demand basis. U.S. Pat. No. 5,159,900 to Wilbur Dammann discloses the use of an electrical arc between two carbon electrodes submersed in water to produce the reaction necessary to rapidly oxidize carbon and produce COH.sub.2 gas. Because the carbon electrodes were consumed during the reaction, there was no residue. Rather, the total of the water and carbon was changed to an oxygenated combustible gas. This process can be represented by the following equation: C+H.sub.2 O.fwdarw.CO+H.sub.2.
Thus, carbon and water are consumed during the reaction, without the production of residue. While water can be easily added within the reaction chamber without disrupting the reaction, the carbon electrodes cannot be replaced in the reaction chamber without disrupting the reaction.